I Miss Paying £1.52 for a Pint

Why did it feel like I had more financial freedom in the past - was it just the prices?

A pint of Ayingerbrau used to be £1.52 at my parents local. That was back in 2003. That price has stuck with me all of this time, but I couldn’t tell you how much a pint of Cruzcampo is in my new local. When I was 18 I didn’t really have any money, I could only work around college and I was starting from pretty much nothing. Yet, it feels like I’ve never had as much financial freedom as I did back then. How can that possibly be the case?

Part of the reason that price has stuck with me is because it’s oddly specific. It doesn’t seem like a number that works in a pub setting. It’s a lot of change to count and give out. I’m particularly aware of this because I’d spend the rest of my night carrying it around until eventually I’d get to The Cornerhouse. A bottle of VK Apple in the Cornerhouse was £0.69.

Allow £5 for a London Pizza at the end of the night, and £2 for splitting a minibus home and I could get pretty drunk and have a good night for £20.

The Bank of England reckons that £20 in 2003 is worth around £37.50 today and I think that maybe I could actually have that same night out today for the same money. Is it still just as simple as still going for the cheapest options?

Ayingerbrau was the cheapest lager at the cheapest pub chain, VK Apple was the worst of the alco-pops. GiGi’s pizza was average at best (no wood fired options here) and once you split a taxi between enough people it’s always going to be cheap. I could even walk home if I had to.

It’s not just drinks where I was saving money. An NUS card knocked money off almost everything, Napster meant I wasn’t buying albums and getting my PlayStation chipped saved a fortune on games. If things got really desperate, I could always ask my parents for £20 and hope they’d forget about it.

I couldn’t recreate all of the same conditions today though. The obvious difference was that I had no rent or mortgage to pay, and my parents still paid for most of my food. Like most parents, they also seemed happy to have me over the summer without charging upkeep.

There was also so little expectation. I was 18 - never worked a day in my life and felt no entitlement. None of my friends had any money either and just a few months ago we weren’t even allowed in a pub. So if we can go for a cheap night out, see our friends and feel like proper adults - it doesn’t matter that we’ve done it on the cheap.

And all this penny pinching gave me some of the best nights of my life. Student nights out with loud music, heavy drinking and dodgy kebabs. Either heading home afterwards or back to student halls. These are some of the most vivid recollections I have of my early adulthood.

Would I go on one of these nights out now? Absolutely not! Not because things have got more expensive, or because the pubs and clubs have changed. It’s that everything around it has changed. It’s me that has changed.

I am no longer locked into the cheapest beers. I can splurge on a wood fired pizza or a single malt whisky here and there. So why do I feel like I had more freedom at 18?

It’s because the rest of my life has moved on too. With marriage and children has come real, life changing responsibility. Money is nowhere near the biggest motivator any more. Time, energy and stability have become far more important.

Suddenly my commitments really matter. It’s not just about me any more. It’s about my family, paying for my children’s swimming lessons, making sure I have a safe financial future. Ensuring that my children will always have a family home to come back to. Making sure I can lend them £20 when they turn 18.

After a long day at work, a night up with the baby, hours poring over your budget - then you deserve a little treat. Spending money on a nice meal out makes all of the sense in the world.

You can see now that my opening lines to you were flawed. I didn’t have the financial freedom I remember at 18. I have the financial freedom now.

So, I don’t really miss the £1.52 pints - drinking the cheapest lager and buying the worst alcopops. 20 years have passed and softened the edges and made the carpets less sticky.

In reality, I wasn’t cash rich back then, I was time and energy rich and I had no real responsibility. Nothing to prove and nothing to lose.

The life I have today is exactly what 18-year-old me was looking forward to. I wouldn’t swap places. But I do think that I understood better back then, that you can have a good night out with very little, as long as you have the right people, and that freedom isn’t measured in money - it’s the ability to spend your time however you choose.

If you’ve got a few quid spare though - don’t order the Ayingerbrau.